After heading down to the springhouse around noon today to patch together the badly jerry-rigged connection from the cistern so as to get the water going again (no, the new ram jet system isn’t there yet, but we did get the new cistern to bury on the ridge…), I was glad for the gorgeous, crisp and clear weather. For a change, the summer having been absolutely miserable hot and humid inch-a-day rainy yuck until the second week of August. It’s quite a hike, so I was resting in my chair being grateful for peace and quiet and gazing at the impossible Carolina Blue sky out my window.

Then I felt the shaking. I thought it was Starfish the German Shepherd scratching right under my chair and turned to look. She was laying across the room looking at me like it was MY fault. Then the china started rattling and knick-knacks on the shelves, and I knew it was an earthquake. It didn’t make that deep bass rumbling sound I remember from my childhood in the Philippines and California. Guess the piedmont here east of the continental divide is just too much mud and clay to generate those good deep basalt earth-groans.

Only lasted about 15 seconds or slightly less. Nothing broke, nothing fell, and all the trees are still standing. But the USGS now rates it a 6.0, centered under Mineral, Virginia. Little aftershocks continuing.

6.0 is a pretty darned big earthquake. Our very first experience with serious rural living was when my hubby got out of the Navy in 1975 and got a job at the North Anna nuclear plant just outside of Mineral. We rented a house on a 700 acre farm between there and Orange, some of the most beautiful rolling hill country anywhere. They hadn’t actually built the power plants yet, planned for four of them in a row on a big man-made lake they had to build for cooling. Deal is, they’d managed to site all four of their planned units smack dab astride a 15-foot wide earthquake fault they didn’t know about until they started digging. We got there just when the pit for the #1 reactor had reached its spec depth.

Now, you and I might reasonably suppose that if you found out your reactors were going to be suspended astride a fault, you might want to move them over about 30 feet in either direction so they’d be safely on one side or the other if the fault ever gave way. But alas, we are not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So on a tour one day I got a bird’s eye view from a specially built platform over the pit to see them busy like little ants attempting to wire the earth together with rebar. Really, I kid you not. Struck me at the time quite hilarious, and I’ve laughed about it ever since.

Hubby’s job consisted of going with another ex-Navy nuke across the lake every day in a nice utility company speedboat to change the paper at various seismic stations to monitor for earthquake activity. They found a floating slalom ski one day and took turns using it to get to the sites during that summer. It was all quite idyllic, but life intervened and we didn’t stay long enough for them to actually finish building that first plant. Only two ever got finished before the NRC wised up and nixed the other two.

Today that plant lost offsight power and operators had to manually scram, emergency diesels are operating to keep them cool. Power should be on before too long, but there’s quite a lot of damage in the area. Something to think about in the wake of Fukushima, as North Anna was identified years ago when I got that bird’s eye view as the nuclear facility most likely to suffer earthquake damage east of the Mississippi. There are of course more dangerous ones in California, right on the coast where tsunamis could wreak havoc as well.

Yet another reminder of how important it is for us to get serious about producing alternative power. For our homesteads and to feed the grid, all over the country. You never hear about horrible wind spills or solar meltdowns. When a wind turbine falls down it doesn’t make entire swaths of the countryside uninhabitable for hundreds of years. When solar panels fall off the roof it might kill whoever happens to be standing where it lands, but it doesn’t doom whole generations of children to gnarly disease and ugly death.

We homesteaders must be the backbone behind the vanguard. Today’s little shake-up is a timely reminder of that.

The Last Mountain is a new documentary film detailing the gross environmental destruction of mountaintop removal [MTR] coal mining, featuring interviews with some of the activists most involved in trying to save the beautiful Appalachian mountains from King Coal.

The subject of MTR has been covered previously on this blog in a number of posts, including EPA Halts MTR Permits for Review, with information about EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s attempt to slow the destruction – a task that has been less than successful due to the power of King Coal. Old King Coal vs. Reality talks about some of the legislative actions attempted by states impacted by MTR to prevent the continued destruction of mountains and entire watersheds – which have also been less than successful. Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul described some of the environmental horrors being visited upon the land, water and people of the Appalachian highlands by a coal mining method that has succeeded in eliminating 40,000 jobs for those same people while burying more than 2,000 miles of once pure mountain streams and flattening 500 mountains.

The film’s fine website includes links and outlines of ways you can help end mountaintop removal mining, something people even well outside the Appalachian region should support. We must not allow these most ancient and abundant mountains on earth to be utterly destroyed to serve the bottom line of criminal enterprises like Massey Energy – which racked up more than 60,000 environmental violations between 2000 and 2006 and criminal charges for violations leading to the explosion at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners in 2008.

It’s not easy to stand against King Coal. Just in the last two years more than 200 people have been arrested in civil disobedience protests just in West Virginia and Kentucky, two states that are suffering the bulk of destruction and the loss of more than a million acres of forest and dozens of towns. This extreme form of coal extraction has turned the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and southwest Virginia into a moonscape of barren, toxic wasteland. What needs to happen, and needs to happen soon, is for so many people to make a stand that the unholy alliance of King Coal, state politicians on the take and law enforcement are forced to step aside.

Please see this film. Arrange a showing (can be done through the website) and invite all your friends and neighbors, maybe your co-workers and boss. Join or support some of the alliance groups that have supported the production of The Last Mountain. Some of these are listed and linked below.

If the Appalachians are destroyed for their coal thousands of homesteads will be destroyed along with them, along with the loving work all those homesteaders did to develop their little pieces of heaven on earth for themselves, their families, and all of us who are making the same effort in our own lives, wherever we are doing it. We all must stand with the people of Appalachia against the forces of destruction-for-profit. Thanks, Homesteaders! Let’s get together and end this outrage now, not later!

Alliance Links:

Appalachian Voices
I Love Mountains
Coal River Mountain Watch
Natural Resources Defense Council
Sierra Club
Waterkeeper Alliance
CREDO Action
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition

As my family begins work to re-engineer our water system by tapping a new spring and installing a ram pump to a new cistern on the ridge, I am once again thankful for our semi-abundant supply of clean, fresh water on our mountain homestead via two clear-running creeks draining the National Forest uphill to the continental divide. I realize that we have something real and valuable here to work with that way too many people who aren’t lucky enough to live here do not have – a nearly endless supply of water pure enough to drink without filtering, fresh and cold enough to host ample populations of native trout, and fast enough to escape the winter freezes on its way to the piedmont’s rivers and lakes.

Serious shortages of fresh potable water across entire regions of the Middle East, Africa, central and south Asia have long been in the news as conditions grow worse with the advent of global warming. Extended droughts have caused increasingly destructive wildfires in Australia, Russia and here in the United States, where fires so far this year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have charred millions of acres of land.

To get a picture of how bad the situation is getting – and how agricultural policies, municipal waste and unsustainable consumption levels affect the clean water we Americans tend to take for granted, consider the fact that the mighty Colorado River no longer flows to the sea because every drop is diverted along the way. Running 1,450 miles through seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, the river and its tributaries have been impounded by 20 dams along its length to provide water to cities in the parched southwest and water for irrigation, golf courses, desert green-spaces and such. Some researchers are saying that Lake Mead, the source of water for 22 million people, may be dry by 2012.

With the human population growing at an increasingly unsustainable rate, irrigation for growing crops around the world has also increased by millions of hectares, more than doubling from less than 150 million to 300+ million hectares since 1960. As the climate changes more rain will fall in some places while other places turn to desert, and no one seems to be paying enough attention to our bad agricultural practices and lousy dietary choices that pretend clean water is something we can all take for granted forever. It’s not just the fabled Colorado that is running dry – China’s Yellow River, which used to flood so severely every year that my childhood never saw a year when hundreds of thousands of people weren’t drowned, no longer reaches the sea and has been known to go completely dry. One of the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea is now completely dry for part of every year, even as the Aral itself shrinks alarmingly.

Lake Chad in central Africa has shrunk by 95% in the last 40 years, and the Punjab region of India is facing a vastly diminished water table, as is our own Great Plains breadbasket region as the vast Ogallala Aquifer is drained steadily to irrigate genetically engineered crops used to feed livestock raised in unhealthy CAFOs for meat rather than human beings.

As we here at the homestead move through the summer being very careful to ration our water usage due to the cracked cistern, it’s not hard to see how it’s not just our bad farming practices that waste and pollute the earth’s water supplies, it’s also ourselves. Why doesn’t everyone have low-flow toilets and showers by now? Why do we still fill big bathtubs high for lengthy soaks when a few inches of water would do the job of washing away the grime just fine? Why do we insist on those ridiculous manicured lawns that serve no purpose at all, when a nice veggie or flower garden would be much more inviting, and local, well-acclimated wild plants would make for a much more interesting landscape?

UK’s Independent published an article citing details of the World Water Development Report released this week, and the outlook isn’t good. Right now 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water, and nearly 2 and a half billion lack proper sanitation. Inertia among the world’s political leaders means that necessary efforts for conservation aren’t even starting despite the ever worsening situation. The projection is that by the middle of this century at least 7 billion people in 60 countries will face water scarcity. This adds up to hunger, disease and death.

What little fresh water the planet does have is being polluted unmercifully. Much pollution comes from chemically dependent agriculture, but in our haste to exploit energy sources the practice of fracking for natural gas is shocking in its gross disregard for environmental preservation. In some places water coming out of taps actually burns, and the chemical stews used in the process don’t even have to be reported for toxicity. The pollution is so shocking that the state of New Jersey this month passed a statewide ban on franking in order to protect their water supplies. Pennsylvania is considering its own ban, and more states are sure to follow.

At present more than 1,100 U.S. counties face water scarcity issues. That’s a third of all counties in the contiguous 48 – this is a very, very serious situation we should all be paying attention to. For homesteaders out here working hard to become as self-sufficient as possible, we might well begin to consider our own water supplies to be the most valuable natural resource of all in our efforts to protect and defend the land and our chosen way of life.

I know that our current water troubles here on my own homestead have certainly made me more aware of just how precious this resource really is, even though I do not irrigate my crops at all because there is no shortage of rainfall in these Great Smoky Mountains. I have been following the various models for projecting what is to occur as the climate changes, and have been somewhat gratified to see that while we can expect up to 4 degrees overall rise in annual temperature means, we are slated to also get about 4 inches more rain every year. I can always plant peaches, figs and pecans in the orchard if it gets too warm for good apples and pears, grow more watermelons and pumpkins for market. But ensuring the purity and continued flow of water through my land must become a passion that I’m as willing to pursue as my lobbying against GMOs to neighboring farmers in order to protect the value of my organic crops.

They attempted a couple of years ago to carve out sections of the National Forest we abut, so developers could create fancy log McMansion gated communities for wealthy people’s vacation comfort. These developments had carte blanche to divert the natural mountain streams that drain the eastern side of the divide for their own lakes and golf courses and such, which would discharge chemicals along with their sewage back into the streams uphill of us that then flow through my property. Every conservation group in the region got together, and with help from us landowners lobbied hard to the federal agencies who thought they could sell portions of our collective natural heritage to rich people just because there was lots of money involved. The very best thing to come out of the nationwide financial collapse – and real estate bust – was that this plan got shelved when nobody was buying. Though we are watchful, because once things pick up again they’ll be right back to buying up tracts of National Forest for their own amusement and dumping their waste on us.

This can happen anywhere there are state and federal lands, way too close to our beloved little plots of land we cherish so much. Even during times of economic distress like the current Great Recession bureaucrats may be moved to sell the water and mineral rights to irresponsible corporate interests for exploitation, and our water woes will get steadily worse. Look around closely at what’s happening in your state and area, and get involved with the conservation groups that are fighting this rape of the land and water. Don’t feel safe just because you no longer live in a city, or because your land abuts set-aside tracts of wilderness. We homesteaders must get active to protect it all, or one of these days we’ll wake up and it will all be gone.

Links:

Frack and ruin: the rise of hydraulic fracturing
FAO Water: water scarcity
EPI Eco-Economy Indicators
Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions
Global Warming: Water scarcity scares US counties
Regulation: an acceptable cost for frackers
N.J. legislature passes ban on fracking

We generously applied some sealant to the inside of the cistern, but it’s still leaking to the point that I can’t do a load of laundry and wash the dishes on the same day. So we’ll have to do the job this summer, and I’m thinking it’s time to go ahead and do what I’ve always wanted to do – put the cistern up on the ridge so we can have gravity feed to the house, and somehow get the water from the source to the cistern without having to use a 220-volt electrical pump. Which is about half our hefty electric bill every month, so whatever we do would be paid for in less than a year.

The issue is that the spring and its settling cisterns are in the bottomland, representing about 150 feet of vertical climb to get water from there to the house. If I wish to pump it to the ridge, water will have to climb another 60-75 feet (depending on where I put the cistern). The spring is next to the creek, however, which flows all year and has ample fall across the width of our acreage. I’ve often thought about damming the creek to have both a trout pond and a turbine for producing electricity, but we’d lose enough juice on the actual distance between us and the creek that it’s not really cost effective.

What we can do, however, is install a hydraulic ram jet to pump the water up the mountain incline to the new cistern, even with a ~225 foot vertical rise. This uses an old technology called a “ram pump” or “ram jet”. It is basically using a “fall” – the amount of vertical drop from the water source to the pump – to pressurize a tank that will then pump the water uphill to where we want it.

Clemson University’s cooperative extension service offers free plans for an easy home-made Hydraulic Ram Pump they say would cost about $120 in parts. Which is cheaper than buying a commercial unit and certainly worth it for the ability to get water from the bottomland to the ridge. I will have to do some serious creekside evaluation and calculations to get all the details right, but so far my back of the napkin estimates show that we could get the 225 feet of lift we need with 30 feet of fall pressure. It wouldn’t pump fast and hard, but once the tank above the house fills, the indoor water pressure on gravity feed will be fine.

The real problem is that we’ll have to tap a spring well upstream of where ours is currently located. Since the creek is spring fed and there is nothing but National Forest beyond us all the way to the continental divide, that shouldn’t be difficult. We will have to dig out the spring and build a protective box over it with a hinged lid that will allow us access to clean out silt occasionally. Then we must tap the spring into a new settling tank (much cheaper than an actual new cistern), run the pipe down to the ram jet which we’ll put in the old pump house to get the pressure we need. We can bury the tank and pipe most of the way which will insulate it against winter freezes.

Judy of the Woods also offers plans for a low cost, low flow ram pump engineered to do precisely what we are planning to do with ours. With clear illustrations and instructions, this seems like a project almost any homesteader who lives on graded land could do for themselves, thereby cutting monthly electricity usage by enough to start seriously thinking about ways of generating the rest on site as well. Which is, of course, a whole other subject…

There is an alternative that we’ve also been considering, which would be a bit more expensive but could be considered by homesteaders on flatter land who have a creek with enough steady 12-month flow to operate an undershot waterwheel. The ‘fall’ pressure is generated via a spiral water wheel so all that extra piping isn’t necessary. Great for tapping the creek itself and pumping uphill to provide wash water and garden water and such, but for drinking water creeks are not anyone’s best choice. Sure, a nice in-sink triple filtering system would work pretty well if there’s no coliform bacteria in the creek, but if you or your upstream neighbors have livestock, you can bet your bippy there will be.

Moreover, during heavy rains creeks tend to become quite muddy and rise enough that an undershot wheel may suffer damage. So it wasn’t too difficult for us to make our choice, no matter how intriguing the spiral wheel may be. I’ll be putting that idea into the folder marked “possibles for electrical generation” if we ever get around to that.

So we’re going to dig out and tap a new spring for this system. As soon as we get started on this project I’ll be taking lots of pictures and reporting here on every step along the way. If any readers out there have already built and installed this type of system, please offer some feedback on what we can expect in the way of glitches and problems, and how we might avoid them. It must be done before winter, so please stay tuned for the updates!

Helpful Links:

Earth Garden: Spiral Water Wheel
Low cost, low flow hydraulic ram pump
Home-made Hydraulic Ram Pump
Small Scale Hydro Power
The Amazing Hydraulic Ram Pump

I am probably not the only American homesteader who has been watching with fascinated horror the events in Japan since the 9.0 earthquake on March 11, its subsequent tsunami on the nation’s northeastern coast, and the amazing nuclear disaster underway at the Fukushima-1 power station. We have heard reports of three reactors in various stages of meltdown, we watched horrified as reactor buildings exploded one by one, and we keep on hearing about unshielded (open to the atmosphere) spent fuel pools that are also in various stages of melting.

Radiation levels have been so high that plant workers attempting to prevent worst-case scenarios by spraying seawater onto the melting fuel had to be withdrawn for extended periods of time. We have been humbled by the selfless courage of workers willing to lose their lives to protect the nation from this awful mess. And this past weekend we have begun hearing about radioactive contamination of food crops and water at ever farther distances from the reactor reservation, even as we concurrently hear about the plume of nasty isotopes having made it across the Pacific to come ashore in California, the most important milk, fruit and vegetable producing region for the entire United States.

Thus it seems timely to offer some real information about radioactive isotopes that will continue to contaminate milk, meat, vegetables and fruit in northern Japan, and which may end up in our food supply too (but in much lower concentration). First, let me direct my readers to an excellent blog effort by a friend of mine who spent a long career in government [USDA] assessing various dangers to the food supply, including emergency planning for radiological accidents and how they can contaminate food.

Radioactive contamination of food: A primer for consumers by my friend, who goes by the internet pseudonym of “Deep Harm,” is the best place to start in gaining understanding of how to minimize your family’s exposure to radioisotopes in food, along with very good information about how all this works, what it means, and how to protect yourself.

To Deep Harm’s work I would add just a few details that should also be kept in mind whenever you hear that the plume is in your area, or has been in your area during the most important weeks of the growing cycle (like spring). First, it is NOT the external gamma dose given off by radioactive particles in the cloud/plume that are of primary concern. That will be so minimal on this side of the planet that it won’t add up to a single chest X-ray all told. The real danger comes from the isotopes themselves – atoms of matter in the air that you can’t even see. If these get into your body by breathing or being ingested with your food and water, they can do many times the biological damage right up close to your internal organs.

And for those of us who grow some of our own food, it is important to know that it’s not just these isotopes “falling out” of the cloud onto the ground and plants that needs to be considered. You could wash that off of many foods without too much trouble. A bigger problem is that when isotopes such as cesium, strontium and many others will, if they are in the soil, be uptaken by growing plants and incorporated into their very cells. Cesium is uptaken just like potassium, neither plants nor animal bodies (including yours) can tell the difference. Strontium is uptaken just like calcium, which will, if you ingest it, be greedily allocated to your bones. And this is known to cause leukemias and other cancers over time. The iodine that is such a threat to thyroid glands isn’t uptaken in high amounts due to its short half-life (8 days), but easily gets on the grass that is eaten by cows and from there into the milk.

Officials will of course be keeping careful track of the situation both in Japan and here in the U.S., but self-reliant homesteaders should also bear in mind that potential problems will tend to be downplayed drastically. Supposedly to prevent “panic,” though no nuclear power plant accident has ever actually caused people to run screaming down the streets as if they were being chased by Godzilla. In situations where radioactive fallout is present, what you don’t know CAN hurt you. Those who are in charge of knowing are too often unwilling to let you know everything you need to know. So bear that in mind as the weeks and months proceed, Fukushima’s nukes will be releasing steadily for the foreseeable future because they are not and cannot be contained.

As a perfect example of the kind of insufficient and occasionally downright misleading information that can come out of supposedly responsible ‘officials’, let me just deconstruct an article from the March 21 edition of the Mainichi (Japan) News:
No need to fear radioactive contamination of food, rain if proper steps taken: experts. This article is a short series of questions and answers, the most misleading of which I deal with below…

1. What happens if you eat food products that have been contaminated by radiation?

Expert Answer: Radioactive iodine has a tendency to collect in the thyroid, and ingesting massive amounts raises the risk of thyroid cancer. However, it has a half-life of eight days, which is relatively short.

Me – It doesn’t take “massive” amounts of iodine to cause thyroid problems or thyroid cancers, which tend to show up years down the road. The greater the dose, the sooner the problems appear, 3-5 years if you get a lot, 10-20 years for far lesser doses. The 8-day half-life means nothing in this equation except to assure you that what you have ingested is emitting its radiation quickly and steadily to your thyroid. Sure, it may be essentially gone in a two or three months because it has decayed, but the damage it did to sensitive internal tissues while it was decaying is already done.

2. What are the “provisional regulation levels” of radiation that spinach and raw milk were found to exceed?

Expert Answer: These levels refer to standards from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare based on [Japan's] Food Sanitation Act.

Me – Spinach, milk, canola and other leafy greens in a 150-mile distance from the stricken reactors have tested for iodine and cesium at above these standards and the Japanese government has acted to prevent those food products from getting into the marketplace. It is reasonable to presume that agricultural products from this entire region will be a total loss this year, and due to large amounts of longer-lived isotopes in the soil, may have to be abandoned as a ‘dead zone’ like that around Chernobyl for many years into the future.

3. Is it okay to keep eating such food products?

Expert Answer: According to former University of Tokushima professor Jun Sekizawa, much of the radioactive material found on spinach can be eliminated by washing and boiling it. As for milk, Sekizawa says, “drinking even the most contaminated [1,500 becquerels] several times is still less than one tenth of the radiation people are exposed to in the natural world. He adds that people will be fine if they do nit keep drinking the milk.

Me – This is nothing less than insidious. You cannot scrub green leafs enough to cleanse them of radioisotopes (root crops should be okay if they are harvested now). Nor does boiling affect radioisotopes in the least. Pasteurization of milk won’t get rid of iodine or strontium either. So it’s a complete lie that it can be boiled out of vegetables. Assuming that ‘officials’ are reporting truthfully about contamination levels – which has never been known to happen in the entire history of nuclear technology – telling people to boil is doing WORSE than nothing. The fair assumption should be that the ‘official’ story on radiation is short by at least a factor of ten. Proceed accordingly.

4. Is it safe to drink tap water?

Expert Answer: The maximum consumption limit per one liter of water is 300 becquerels for iodine and 200 becquerels for cesium. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says that while people should refrain from drinking water whose iodine and cesium levels exceed the regulation limit, it can safely be used for bathing and washing. The ministry also says that it is safe to drink the water if there are no other alternatives.

Me – I’d avoid drinking the water entirely when radiation levels are present. If I had no other choice (and many people still stuck in the prefecture don’t have a choice), I’d drink it to stay alive. Here in the U.S. levels are unlikely to reach anything close to federal limits, but I’d sure replace the charcoal and particulate filters on my water filtration system just to make sure. Iodine is captured very well by activated charcoal. Then I’d change them again when the all clear comes. I would seriously avoid showering or bathing in hot water, as the steam will bring contaminates right into your nasal passages and lungs. Only lukewarm or cool for washing, and definitely use an abrasive type soap such as Lava. Or use a loufa sponge. Throw it away after a few uses.

Whenever there is radioactive contamination present in the air, soil and water, people who spend time outdoors should definitely wash off thoroughly once indoors. Dry quickly and well, especially the face, and don’t re-use towels. Keep soiled laundry in enclosed containers. Don’t wear your outdoor shoes inside the house. Luckily, the Japanese are noted for fastidiousness in these areas, it will serve them well in this crisis.

5. What should we do when it rains?

Expert Answer: Stay out of the rain as much as possible, and whatever you do, don’t drink the rainwater.

Me – Always wear a brimmed rain hat to keep the rain out of your hair, and a rain coat to keep it off your skin. Keep this outer clothing away from the living areas of the house (like in a mud room) along with shoes and boots. And do that scrubbing wash thing whenever you’ve been exposed – the rain will contain far more contaminates than will be present on a nice day in the air.

Bottom line for those of us who don’t live in Japan, we are not going to be exposed to seriously dangerous levels of isotopes or gamma dose from the plume. Most of the very serious heavy metal fission products will fall out of the cloud over the ocean (or very close to Fukushima) well before they get here. But if we remember that it’s not the exterior gamma dose that will most harm us – but the isotopes falling out of the plume that might get inside us – we should be mostly okay.

Back in the days of atmospheric bomb testing the levels were very, very high. I can remember when word came down that we couldn’t make snow ice cream anymore, and always wondered how much of a nasty dose I got from eating it every year up until then. Yet another reminder that ‘officials’ aren’t going to tell the truth about the dangers if they can help it. Besides strontium and iodine, which were specifically cited back in 1963 as the reason for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, cesium that got into the food and water supplies was a big consideration.

Think about this, then – there is more cesium-137 in just one of the spent fuel pools at Fukushima than was released by all the nuclear weapons ever exploded since the beginning of the nuclear age. Sobering thought, but one that it might be valuable to hold when the real debate on shutting these nasty things down for good comes to a forum near you!

Back in June I posted a disgusted ode to King Coal’s most outrageous method of extracting the combustible black rock from these most beautiful and abundant Appalachians. In that post, Desperate for Fossil Fuels, I described the environmental horror known as “Mountaintop Removal” and offered a bunch of useful links for further information, environmental coalitions and direct actions aimed at stopping this crazy rape of the earth.

Just six months later on December 22, an earthen dam gave way at a coal ash holding pond in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling more than a billion gallons of the sludge into a neighborhood as well as into the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers. Three homes were completely destroyed, many others within the 300 acre sludge zone had to be evacuated, dead fish littered the banks of the rivers and the people of eastern Tennessee as well as the rest of the nation suddenly became familiar with what this waste product of burning coal contains. It’s not pretty.

Concentrated in this nasty toxic waste are poisons and heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury, nickel, vanadium, beryllium, cadmium, barium, chromium, copper, molybdenum, zinc, lead and selenium. There are also concentrations of radioactive elements including uranium, thorium and radium. These substances readily leach from the ash into water, and the rivers and wells around the spill site have tested high in arsenic and other pollutants – residents have been warned to drink only bottled water until they hear otherwise.

Yet despite the fact that there is a toxic load in the millions of pounds of ash produced in America every year from burning coal, the EPA does not regulate it as toxic waste and some states don’t regulate it at all. Thus despite known problems with retention of the sludge, this waste product is actually considered to be a valuable commercial product all by itself!

There are actually marketers of coal fly ash that do nothing but re-sell the stuff for use in concrete and cement, as structural landfill and mine reclamation, as base for roads, for making bricks, and even as “inert filler” in agricultural fertilizer (along with waste from other industries, like steel production). Is it any wonder that our once-fertile plains now need ever-increasing amounts of fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides and genetically engineered crop cultivars in order to grow anything at all?

Those of us who are committed to lovingly managing our land and producing as much of our own sustenance as possible using the most organic of tried-and-true methods can use the sad experience of the people in eastern Tennessee as an opportunity to learn more about what ‘standard practices’ our rural neighbors may be using that could threaten our family’s health and livelihood. Large farms upstream of our homesteads could be using industrial waste-based fertilizers that will leach contaminants into our water sources as easily as their in-season chemical sprays will.

While arsenic in the water is a serious concern for our drinking water, irrigation water and livestock water, heavy metals can wreak terrible havoc as well. Round-Up doesn’t contain heavy metals, your neighbor may think he’s being responsible. So he probably needs to know what’s in that fertilizer too, as he may be wondering why his crops do so poorly and his livestock are so sickly. Do your research, put your findings into an easy-to-read format, and present them at future meetings of your extension classes or community farm planning groups. Pass them out at the farmer’s market and contact environmental groups in your area who are or should become involved in dealing with these issues.

This earth is our only home. Our homesteads – our beloved little corners of earth – are our pleasure, our pride, our freedom and our example to the world. If we won’t protect and defend them, no one else will. So as we move into this hopeful new year with a new administration with a commitment to sustainable energy policies for the future, don’t let anybody fool you about “Clean Coal” – there is no such thing.

We can choose to go with clean, efficient, renewable energy sources. We can choose to diversify our production so that gigantic mega-watt plants aren’t necessary to supply our needs. We can choose to stop raping and pillaging our planet for the short-term gain for the wealthy few, while ignoring basic livability for our children and grandchildren’s future. Get mad, get involved, get busy!

Links:

Desperate for Fossil Fuels
“Mountaintop Removal”
Coal Fly Ash
USGS: Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash
Fear in the Fields: How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer

As the world economy continues its wide swings mired in uncertainty as well as hope that the necessary changes in the way we energize our world will finally get a real chance for development, scientists at the University of Michigan, funded by the US Department of Energy, have developed a new technology inspired by the way fish swim that can harness the power of slow-moving water.

Most hydropower technologies rely on the action of waves, tides or faster currents caused by dams, and need the water to move as fast as five or six knots in order to operate efficiently. This new system can generate electricity in water that flows less than one knot (about 1 mile per hour), and does not require placing obstructions in or on top of the water as other methods do. Rather, this new system uses cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs beneath the surface of the waterway. As the water moves past the cylinders, it creates vortices which push and pull them up and down on the springs. It is the mechanical energy in the vibrations that is converted into electricity.

The scientists published their work in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering, and are busily constructing a prototype in the Detroit River – which has a flow of less than two knots. They estimate that this technology would require up to 50 times less ocean acreage as wave power generation systems, and could work in places such as the English Channel, which enjoys quite a strong current, without offering any surface obstructions to shipping lanes or even to picturesque views from the shore.

UM professor of naval architecture Michael Bernitsas calls the system Vivace, or “vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy.” He explains the inspiration of how fish curve their bodies to glide between the vortices created by the bodies of the fish swimming in front of them. “Their muscle power alone could not propel them through the water at the speed they go, so they ride in each other’s wake,” says Bernitsas.

The really exciting thing is how much power this fairly simple technology could potentially produce. A field of cylinders installed on a sea or river bed and taking up just 1km by 1.5km and about the height of a 2-story house could convert a slow three knot flow into enough electrical power for 100,000 homes. Small systems with just a few cylinders stacked like a ladder could be used to power lighthouses or ships at anchor. Once developed fully, the power would be cheaper than wind, and much cheaper than solar.

Now, this technology isn’t going to make my homestead energy independent any time soon, given that I’ve just two mountain creeks barely deep enough for trout and crawdads, so I’m better off just building a small dam or sluice and installing a turbine just big enough for my needs. I can supplement with solar, both for generating power and for passive uses (water heating, heat gain in the cabin, etc.). But even in my fondest dreams I’m wanting to take Duke Energy up on their backwards meter deal so they have to buy my excess “green” production when I’m not using it all, and I can get electricity from the grid even when my systems go off-line. For the big power companies who trade energy per demand through the grid, this new hydropower technology could make a big dent in our future needs.

So… all we need to figure out once we’ve got all our alternatives in rapid development, is how to fix our antique grid! I’m sort of hoping they’ll opt for a wireless system of some sort, maybe re-discover some of Nicholai Tesla’s very interesting ideas about that. We’re busy getting wireless service for our computers and cell phones, surely it can’t be that hard to figure out an application for electricity. Or is it? Hmmm… guess I’ll have to look into that and report back!

Telegraph: Ocean currents can power the world

People used to think about water as an infinite resource. They could use it, abuse it, pollute it and sink their garbage into it with impunity, it would never run dry and would somehow clean itself of sewage and chemicals and industrial waste. This short-sighted view of life’s most precious and necessary resource justified the great post-war “turf boom” expansion of the population into designed suburbs of cookie-cutter houses with neat green lawns and homeowners’ associations that decided they could dictate what residents were allowed to plant, whether there could be a few weeds in the mix, and how often those green expanses of useless grass had to be watered and dosed with chemicals in order to maintain the cookie-cutter expanses of identical expanses of useless grass.

Now that we know water is a lot more precious than we thought, that climate change is imposing long-term droughts on entire swaths of the earth, that unwise allocations have drained ancient aquifers, and that a lot of the water people have to drink is polluted by things nobody really wants to know about, it’s a good time to re-think our entire approach to water. This is yet another necessary change in humanity’s relationship with the natural world that must start in the countryside and outer ‘burbs with motivated individuals who will commit to doing things differently, and educate their neighbors about how it’s done and how great it can be made to look.

Most of the surface and groundwater on the planet is salty. Shortages of fresh water have led to conflicts and open warfare through history. In Bolivia the American corporation Bechtel has attempted to corner the water market in order to privatize it, even making it illegal for individuals to harvest rainwater from their own property. Their model for this ridiculous legislation comes from Colorado, where it’s also illegal to harvest rainwater (because it diminishes downstream supply).

Food not Lawns informs us that 270 billion gallons of water are used in the US every year just to water expanses of useless grass on people’s lawns. Out west in the desert areas of the country 70% of water use is just to sustain turf lawns. We simply cannot keep doing this and still expect to eat and live. If your homestead doesn’t yet have rainbarrels with attached faucets and hoses for watering your garden crops, this is definitely the year to install some, one per down-spout from the roof. The food crisis has hit America and will only get worse. Homesteaders and small farmers – CSA memberships and organizations – will have to take up some of the slack in providing locally grown food to communities, thus we need to be first in line to totally rearrange our water priorities.

We can also educate others about growing native plant species (that do fine with just annual rainfall) where expanses of useless grass used to be – and turning unused areas of their property into vegetable patches and fruit thickets and orchards instead of trying to maintain expanses of useless grass. Grape vines growing on fences can offer summer privacy as well as tasty grapes. Miniature apple, peach, cherry and nut trees can add shady spots for sitting as well as fresh fruit.

Some suburbanites might be amazed at how much food can be grown in small spaces with proper management, or how great it feels to serve a healthy salad with tomatoes and cucumbers to the luncheon club that was entirely grown right there on the porch and in the yard. Getting more involved with our food and food production could do a lot to help encourage a more healthy diet generally, and an appreciation for where food comes from and what it’s really worth.

Once someone in an area visits a naturalized homestead and returns to remake his/her own lawn into a naturescape of natural beauty and healthy water use, it’s just not that hard to start a regular movement. Homeowners in any suburban subdivision are members of their homeowners’ associations. They can arrange for speakers to present at meetings, host xeriscaping field trips and tours, get the rules changed to allow those expanses of useless grass to turn into something naturally useful and beautiful.

Local creeks, rivers and water treatment plants will have to deal with much less of a load of toxins and chemical pesticides and herbicides, overall water use will drop significantly (saving homeowners money, important in a shriveling economy), and neighborly greetings over the fences will include garden talk and food exchanges and good advice and complements to the landscape, instead of just grumpy waves by sweaty, grumpy guys behind loud lawnmowers and leafblowers. Everyone’s lifestyle improves!

Many of us committed homesteaders either live near suburbia or actually in it. Or we know people who live there, and who are so caught up in their dead-end robotic conformities that they could really use something new and hopeful. Check out some of the resources below and see if there’s a way for us forgotten rural dwellers to add something back to what we left behind. Changing the world is a daunting task if you look at it in those missionary terms. But it’s not that hard if all you really want to do is expand your environmental skills to as many neighbors as you can!

Links:

Square Foot Gardening
Food not Lawns
Plant Native
Easy Lawns
Yard Beauty

We’ve looked a bit at on-site electrical generation, transportation fuels and building technologies. In this installment we’ll look at some ways of putting things together into overall strategies for homestead independence.


Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems

In a previous post a short video was offered about as small, 1Kw hybrid energy system using solar and wind offered by a company in Canada. Whether you’re planning to go off-grid with storage batteries or negotiate a price for your excess production with the local utility (and get a “backwards meter”), the same thing is true of energy supplies as is true of general homestead success – diversify. So Here are five hybrid systems, some good links and some cool ideas for planning your alternatives…

16. Solar-Wind

In addition to the previously linked hybrid system from Canada’s SEMA Technology, there are many other solar-wind hybrid systems out there at varying power ratings and costs. Best place to get an overview is from DOE’s Consumer’s Guide to small hybrids. Most homesteaders in areas where the wind isn’t a constant gale will find smaller, steadier units that work well in low wind situations best for their use, while avoiding the bird kill problems of the big 2 and 3-bladed powerhouses.

Some of these (and other hybrid systems) can also be supplemented with generators that operate on biomass, waste cooking oil or methane. The handy homesteader can also make their own waste oil burners to supplement household heat, make an outdoor oven/stove, or even supply the heat for a homestead ethanol fuel still.


17. Hydro-Solar

A micro-hydro system powered either by diverted head flow or sited directly in a flowing creek can supply steady power 24 hours a day. When supplemented by solar during the day, all it takes is proper timing of your consumption habits to live on your home-generated energy budget.

Again, if the homesteader avoids using electricity for thermal energy – home/greenhouse heat, cooking, etc. – a steady power supply from micro-hydro supplemented with wind or solar (or both!) should supply enough electricity for normal homestead uses. An alternative fuel generator can supply occasional heavy loads.

18. Solar-Geoexchange

This is a hybrid “space conditioning” system that doesn’t generate electricity separately, but makes use of clever design engineering to diminish a home’s energy usage year round by using a double wall envelope and below-ground heat sink. This keeps the space at a temperature that doesn’t require air conditioning or much heat in the winter. Since these are among any home’s greatest energy uses, these ideas can be put to work in various ways by the handy homesteader. There are construction companies in many states who specialize in this system, so look around if you’re building! And for an overview, see SolarGeo.

Homesteaders lucky enough to have property over sizeable cave systems, or in geothermal hot spots, have options the rest of us don’t. But eventually thermal gradient technology such as that currently used in today’s heat pump units may be refined to work on very little electrical input, making them a good choice for homesteaders who generate their own juice.

19. Combined Heat and Power Systems

Solar Air Conditioning:

Abbreviated CHP (Combined Heat and Power), systems that make use of the waste heat generated by fuel-powered systems (boilers, furnaces, wood stoves, etc.) to increase efficiency. Depending on where you live and how you’d plan to put the heat to use, a CHP mini-system might be a worthy option. If you live north, the heat can warm your toes and cook your bread. If you live south, consider engineering a version of the thermal energy conversion technology in solar air conditioning to keep your home cool! Solar could help on hot, sunny days, but heat is heat – your CHP system can provide it.

There are CHP home systems available and in development, or again a handy homesteader could rig one up with either an internal combustion or a Stirling engine.

20. Multi-Tech Systems

Most clever homesteaders will have recognized already that diversification of energy sources provides all sorts of hybrids they could hook together to ensure an ample, steady supply of energy to their buildings and property. But for a good overview of what’s being done out there on this level, check out the Hybrid Micro Energy Project [HMEP] home energy multi-tech system.

Making use of integrated photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind and biomass, it’s easy enough to add hydro to the mix. The technology is out there to hook things together, charge batteries or go straight AC to the house or grid. It won’t totally solve America’s energy crisis, but it will solve our homestead energy needs. Big changes always start out with small steps. We can do this.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Electrical Generation
Part 2: Transportation and Motorized Equipment
Part 3: Building Technologies & Direct Alternatives
Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems
Part 5: Collective Strategies for Communities

This series will provide an overview of the most promising energy systems and strategies for homestead or rural community independence. Most of these are available right now, some can be put together by the handy homeowner or community action group, and some will be available in the near future. Combined with common-sense conservation practices these can contribute a great deal to the independence of individual homesteads and rural communities willing to work together.

These technologies and ideas will be divided into particular technologies and presented together – 1. Electrical production; 2. Transportation alternatives – vehicles, fuels and power to operate the kind of equipment necessary to a rural lifestyle (trucks, farm and garden equipment, remote generators, etc.); 3. Building technologies and direct alternatives for heating/cooling and their applications; 4. Hybrid systems that can even out production and tie together for constancy of supply; 5. Collective strategies for small, cooperative communities striving for self-sufficiency and willing to invest together for alternatives that benefit all.

Part 1: Electrical Generation

We use electricity to light our homes and outbuildings, refrigerate our food, wash and dry our clothes, prepare our food, provide our in-home entertainment (music, television, computers), and sometimes to heat or supplement our heat during the winter. The “average” electricity use per home in the US (this is something we can personally adjust downward by conservation and appliance/heat alternatives) is ~900 Kilowatt hours per month. Get that down to ~700 for your home/homestead, and we’re talking less than 8,500 KwH per year.

What are the best alternative sources for that much on-site electrical generation?

1. Solar Panels

Quality solar panels and the accessories to properly install them, hook them together and get the energy available for use costs between $5 and $10 per watt with currently available technology. State and federal governments offer rebates on the systems (tax breaks), and some utilities will also rebate if you opt for the reverse grid tie-in that is in actuality a reasonable option for homesteaders and less expensive in initial outlay than storage batteries, converters, replacement costs, etc. to be completely off-grid. Here are some Fast Solar Energy Facts that may be helpful.

New solar panel technology from Colorado State University is expected to offer PV foil panels made of cadmium telluride rather than crystalline silicon, bringing the cost installed down to $2 per watt, in full production by the end of the year. Or, if you’re resourceful, you could Go Solar For Free.


2. & 3. Other Solar

(2) Making electricity (or power for other uses) using a Stirling Engine makes use of heat differentials… and guess what? The sun is hot! Check out this demonstration of a Stirling engine heated by sunlight through a Fresnel lens…

…just attach it to a generator and you’re in business! There are applications where geothermal heat could be used to power the engine, but most geothermal electrical generation will make direct use of the steam under pressure than simply the temperature gradient. This engine converts solar energy into mechanical energy, which in turn can generate electricity.

(3) The Fresnel lens can also concentrate solar energy in solar panel generation settings, or be used to generate steam for small steam generators using sunlight. Here is our friend at GreenPowerScience again with a solar steam engine…

4. Micro-Hydro Generation

Since water-power is a significant part of our overall national generation capacity, this source scaled down to generation of anything less than 100 Kw per hour is called “Micro-Hydro”. It’s really not that hard to find a water source with enough gradient drop to generate usable power for the homestead.

A micro-hydro generator system can be installed for as little as $10,000, and handy homesteaders can build many of the parts to save even more. The system can charge DC batteries or be wired straight into the home AC wiring. A 500 Watt AC system feeds a steady 500 Watts straight to the home/homestead’s wiring. 24 hours a day for 20 years or more. By choosing alternatives for heat gradient usage (home heating, clothes drying, water heating, electric ovens/ranges), using low-watt fluorescent light bulbs and getting low-watt appliances/gadgets, it’s possible to live all the way off-grid with a mini-hydro system.

5. Wind Generation

Wind generation isn’t practical for everybody, but if you live where the wind generally blows at a semi-steady 10 mph, it might just be the perfect answer. Like micro-hydro, electricity from the generator goes straight into the household wiring, while excess goes back to the grid. Wind turbines (and generators) can be purchased at about the same cost per KwH as micro-hydro, or again the handy homesteader can build their own.

When planning to generate electricity on-site for homestead or in dedicated systems for community use, it’s a good idea to negotiate with the local utility for the backwards meter set-up – the utility buys excess capacity so none of it’s wasted, the homestead or community purchases excess power during peak usage. This avoids the cost and fuss of battery storage (until something better comes along), and careful usage can even earn income for the producers! Buffer the interface and an outage won’t interrupt electricity, it’ll just limit available ‘trons.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Electrical Generation
Part 2: Transportation and Motorized Equipment
Part 3: Building Technologies & Direct Alternatives
Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems
Part 5: Collective Strategies for Communities